When the Prime Minister spread his arms wide open and said, "Donald Trump, I'd be glad to renegotiate NAFTA", I took him at his word when he said he was going to bring back a better deal than we had before. Sadly, the economic impact statement that was just released doesn't compare what Canada will be getting under the new agreement with what we had under the current NAFTA. It says it's the difference between what Canada would get under the new agreement and what we would have if there were no NAFTA at all, which is not the standard that was set when the TPP was negotiated. It's not the standard set for economic impact assessments when the CPTPP was negotiated. In fact, in my time as trade minister, I don't believe we ever used that as the benchmark. We always compared the new agreement to what it was like before that agreement was signed.
It's very disappointing to me that in this agreement that was supposed to be a win-win-win—those are the Prime Minister's words—we have an agreement that by any measure is actually less favourable to Canada. When the American officials talk about it, they say they finally got a much better deal out of this, implying that Canada is the loser. We lost an opportunity to address buy American provisions that continue to plague our bilateral relationship.
I have a question for Mr. Jacobi. Thank you for being so patient in waiting for this.